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Now if sensations of the active order depend upon the
Couplement of soul and body, sensation must be of that double
nature. Hence it is classed as one of the shared acts: the soul,
in the feeling, may be compared to the workman in such operations
as boring or weaving, the body to the tool employed: the body is
passive and menial; the soul is active, reading such impressions
as are made upon the body or discerned by means of the body,
perhaps entertaining only a judgement formed as the result of the
bodily experiences.
In such a process it is at once clear that the sensation is a
shared task; but the memory is not thus made over to the
Couplement, since the soul has from the first taken over the
impression, either to retain or to reject.
It might be ventured that memory, no less than sensation, is a
function of the Couplement, on the ground that bodily
constitution determines our memories good or bad; but the answer
would come that, whether the body happens or not to be a
hindrance, the act of remembering would still be an act of the
soul. And in the case of matters learned [and not merely felt, as
corporeal experiences], how can we think of the Couplement of
soul and body as the remembering principle? Here, surely, it must
be soul alone?
We may be told that the living-being is a Couplement in the sense
of something entirely distinct formed from the two elements [so
that it might have memory though neither soul nor body had it].
But, to begin with, it is absurd to class the living-being as
neither body nor soul; these two things cannot so change as to
make a distinct third, nor can they blend so utterly that the
soul shall become a mere faculty of the animate whole. And,
further, supposing they could so blend, memory would still be due
to the soul just as in honey-wine all the sweetness will be due
to the honey.
It may be suggested the while the soul is perhaps not in itself a
remembering principle, yet that, having lost its purity and
acquired some degree of modification by its presence in body, it
becomes capable of reproducing the imprints of sensible objects
and experiences, and that, seated, as roughly speaking it is,
within the body, it may reasonably be thought capable of
accepting such impressions, and in such a manner as to retain
them [thus in some sense possessing memory].
But, to begin with, these imprints are not magnitudes [are not of
corporeal nature at all]; there is no resemblance to seal
impressions, no stamping of a resistant matter, for there is
neither the down-thrust [as of the seal] nor [the acceptance] as
in the wax: the process is entirely of the intellect, though
exercised upon things of sense; and what kind of resistance [or
other physical action] can be affirmed in matters of the
intellectual order, or what need can there be of body or bodily
quality as a means?
Further there is one order of which the memory must obviously
belong to the soul; it alone can remember its own movements, for
example its desires and those frustrations of desire in which the
coveted thing never came to the body: the body can have nothing
to tell about things which never approached it, and the soul
cannot use the body as a means to the remembrance of what the
body by its nature cannot know.
If the soul is to have any significance- to be a definite
principle with a function of its own- we are forced to recognize
two orders of fact, an order in which the body is a means but all
culminates in soul, and an order which is of the soul alone. This
being admitted, aspiration will belong to soul, and so, as a
consequence, will that memory of the aspiration and of its
attainment or frustration, without which the soul's nature would
fall into the category of the unstable [that is to say of the
undivine, unreal]. Deny this character of the soul and at once we
refuse it perception, consciousness, any power of comparison,
almost any understanding. Yet these powers of which, embodied it
becomes the source cannot be absent from its own nature. On the
contrary; it possesses certain activities to be expressed in
various functions whose accomplishment demands bodily organs; at
its entry it brings with it [as vested in itself alone] the
powers necessary for some of these functions, while in the case
of others it brings the very activities themselves.
Memory, in point of fact, is impeded by the body: even as things
are, addition often brings forgetfulness; with thinning and
dearing away, memory will often revive. The soul is a stability;
the shifting and fleeting thing which body is can be a cause only
of its forgetting not of its remembering- Lethe stream may be
understood in this sense- and memory is a fact of the soul.
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